Karl Marx (1818–1883) As Karl Marx stated in The Communist Manifesto: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” (Marx & Engels, 1848/1908, p. 5). The dynamics of the feudal society were largely defined by the relationship between serfs (agricultural laborers) and Lords, or those who held ownership over the estates to which serfs were bound. Drawing from the insights of Marx, the question of how feudalism transformed into capitalism and the industrialized state is answered with relative ease. Feudalism fell to the wayside because it could not accommodate the demands of capitalism. The feudal system was not efficient enough (not rationalized production). Therefore, the bourgeoisie set up factories to rationalize production, a term which here refers to improving equipment and production processes and reorganizing labor and its management. Importantly, guilds, associations of merchants and artisans and other craftsmen, could not compete with factories. As Marx described the scenario: The guild-masters were pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle class; division of labor between different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labor in each single workshop. (Marx & Engels, 1848/1908, p. 6) Peasant farms, as well, could not compete with “factories on the field.” Bourgeoisie traveled the world to acquire cheap raw materials and labor, giving rise to slavery and the expansion of capitalism globally. “The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part,” said Marx. The Proletariat and Bourgeoisie Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another. —Karl Marx Proletariat, according to Marx, refers to the class of modern wage-laborers who are forced to sell their labor or labor power in order to survive because they own no means of production. Bourgeoisie refers to the modern capitalist class, or those who own the means of production (e.g., factories and mines, or more currently, offices and websites) and employ wage-laborers. Marx viewed the proletariat in one sense, and at one time, as a class which represents the dissolution of class, and in another sense, as the modern working class, or the wage-laborer class. The proletariat were slaves, plebeians, serfs, journeymen, the oppressed, and even owners of smaller industry or business who could not compete with larger capitalists in industry. The bourgeoisie were freemen, patricians, lords, guild-masters, or the oppressors. Marx believed that what made the proletariat was not chiefly a naturally occurring poverty, but an artificial and manufactured one; the proletariat were not the people oppressed by society, but the dissolution of society and its middle or working class. He went further in saying that wealth and the proletariat were antithetical, but because of this, formed a whole. They were the result of private property: “Private property as private property, as wealth, is compelled to preserve its own existence and thereby the existence of its opposite, the proletariat” (Marx & Engels, 1845/1956, p. 51). The proletariat, Marx maintained, is compelled to abolish itself and private property, which makes it what it is. Private property, Marx contended, represents the side of the conservative force in society, while the proletariat represents the side of destruction. The proletariat man represents the great concentration of inhuman living conditions in contemporary society, in Marx’s view, and has lost himself because of this, while concurrently being aware of this loss. Automation and the division of labor, Marx stated, had resulted in a loss of the idiosyncrasies of the proletariat’s work, and due to this, the labor had lost its charm for the laborer. The laborer represents an appendage of his machines, his work having been reduced to monotonous, simplistic, and unskilled tasks. The modern bourgeois society, under this paradigm, had not dissolved class issues, but instead had created new ones; new classes, new oppressive circumstances, new ills in place of old. Marx went on to remark that: Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified the class antagonisms: Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat. (Marx & Engels, 1848/1908, p. 6) The bourgeoisie, Marx said, had made wage-laborers of physicians, lawyers, priests, poets, and scientists. The bourgeoisie, Marx said, had ripped from families the veil of sentimentality and had replaced this with a mere money relation. The bourgeoisie, Marx said, cannot subsist without continuously and frequently remaking and improving its means of production, and by way of this, the relationships of production, with each of these having an impact on the relationships of society, overall. A “cosmopolitan character” had been ascribed to production and consumption in every country of the world by way of the bourgeoisie’s exploitation of the world market (Marx & Engels, 1848/1908, p. 7). Even developing (or “barbarian”) nations had been dragged into civilization by the bourgeoisie’s rapid creation and enhancement of various instruments of production. Countries had been subjected to the rule of towns, cities drew and produced mass populations, far outpacing rural communities. Importantly, Marx noted that: In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed—a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital. (Marx & Engels, 1848/1908, p. 9) Yet, Marx recognized the power and success of the bourgeois revolutionaries. As he wrote it, the bourgeoisie had “accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades” (Marx & Engels, 1848/1908, p. 7). Further, he detailed the revolutions and achievements of industrialization and capitalism: The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground—what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor? (Marx & Engels, 1848/1908, p. 8) Still, for all the marvelous activity and advancements that the bourgeoisie had produced, what was their principal end or objective? Profit, typically in the form of making money. This misalignment of priorities might be considered one of Marx’s most significant feuds with capitalism and the bourgeoisie, and perhaps the most misunderstood. Alienation¹ The alienation of man thus appeared as the fundamental evil of capitalist society. —Karl Marx Alienation, in the context of the writings of Marx, may refer to a sense of estrangement, or separation, felt by workers or laborers. More directly, it may refer to a feeling of separation in individuals from others, their work, nature, society, politics, or the world, generally. The concept of alienation dates back to ancient Rome, but more modernly, was developed by theorists such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel² and Marx, particularly the latter, who more so popularized the concept. In Marx’s critical theory, the intent in developing and describing alienation was to illuminate the highly problematic nature of social life in the modern era. Marx argued that, individuals, primarily workers, experience a sense of alienation in “bourgeois society” from the products of their work or labor, from each other, from nature, from humanity, and even from themselves. Further, Marx held that this quality of alienation differed from any similar experience in the past. According to Marx, consecutive generations of people internalize compounded levels of alienation, interpreting them as “natural” to human existence on Earth. In addition, Marx said that assuming modern societies cannot exist without this experience of alienation only serves to exacerbate alienation. He likewise expressed, however, that employing and developing the concept of alienation for analytical or critical purposes does not imply that its elimination is a realistic goal from what was then the foreseeable future. In essence, Marx argued that individuals cannot actively surmount alienation, because it is an innately social condition which is at the heart of modern society. Still, we might be able to approach cognizance of the power of alienation over our existences. Due to the fact that alienation is, on a fundamental level, present in palpable practices, associations, and modes of thinking, adjusting each of those will be necessary initial steps. History, averred Marx, and particularly under modern capitalism, may be viewed as the tale of the laborer’s alienation from his life as a producer, and communism, he reckoned, represented the transcendence of alienation in the form of a revolution against private property. Marx asserted that labor creates not only commodities of product, but produces itself and makes a commodity of the laborer, and that the product of labor, which is owned by the capitalist who employs the laborer, confronts it as something alien, or as a power separate from the laborer who produces it. The product of the worker, said Marx, is objectification, and the loss of this object or product is alienation, or estrangement. Fundamentally, he wrote, the realization of labor is the loss of reality for laborers, and so objectification is the loss of the object, and the object’s appropriation (taking) is or results in alienation. Moreover, Marx contended that appropriation of the laborer’s product appears so much as alienation that the more a laborer produces, the fewer objects he possesses or can posses, and the more he is ruled by his own product, or capital. According to Marx: “All these consequences are implied in the statement that the worker is related to the product of his labor as to an alien object” (Marx, 1932/1959, p. 29, emphasis in original). The result of the alienation of the worker from his product means that his labor becomes an object, external to him and owned by the capitalist, and thus it becomes alien to him. Marx concluded that if the product of labor is alienation, then production itself must be active alienation, or “the alienation of activity” and “the activity of alienation,” and that the alien nature of such labor—which is not voluntary, but coerced—is laid bare in the fact that when no compulsion or need which requires labor exists, it is shunned; the product of labor, as communicated by Marx, is an alien object exercising power over the laborer. Commodities The devaluation of the world of men is in direct proportion to the increasing value of the world of things. —Karl Marx In the words of Marx in Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, a commodity is chiefly an object external to the individual and generally satisfies by some property of itself a human want or need. Marx defined commodities more directly as: “material depositories of exchange value” (Marx, 1867, p. 27). The two aspects of a commodity, said Marx, are use value and value, or the substance of value and the magnitude of value: The utility of a thing makes it a use value. But this utility is not a thing of air. Being limited by the physical properties of the commodity, it has no existence apart from that commodity. A commodity, such as iron, corn, or a diamond, is therefore, so far as it is a material thing, a use value, something useful. This property of a commodity is independent of the amount of labour required to appropriate its useful qualities. (Marx, 1867, p. 27) Marx likewise stated that the use values of commodities only become real via consumption, and that they also make up the substance of all wealth in whatever forms it may manifest. Exchange value, according to Marx, may be simply described as a quantitative relationship between things, or the proportion “in which values in use of one sort are exchanged for those of another sort, a relation constantly changing with time and place” (Marx, 1867, p. 27). Exchange values are largely random and relative, and express something equivalent between two or more things, where these equivalencies may represent equal quantities between two objects common to both, and where these two must be equal to a third value that is neither of them, but from which their value is derived. Importantly, Marx noted that commodities are products of labor, which is to say that commodities are the result of the expenditure of human labor, and therefore, human labor is embodied in or by them; from these arises the value of commodities. The common element which manifests within the exchange values of commodities is their value. Commodities, according to Marx, wherein equal quantities of labor are embodied, or which can be produced in the same time, have the same value. Marx asserted that all commodities are definite masses of “congealed labour time,” and that: “The value of a commodity would therefore remain constant, if the labour time required for its production also remained constant. But the latter changed with every variation in the productiveness of labour” (Marx, 1867, p. 29). Commodities have a physical form and a “value-form” (Marx, 1867, p. 33). From an example provided by Marx, linens may express their value in coats, and coats serve as the material in which said value is expressed, with the former playing an active part and the latter playing a passive one, where the linen holds a relative value and the coat exists in an equivalent form. Marx wrote that man, via his industry, alters materials, provided by nature, in form so as to make them useful to his needs or wants, and where wood—a common, quotidian thing—may be furnished into a table, it then transcends its ordinary value and steps forth as a commodity. Marx said of this: “A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour” (Marx, 1867, p. 47). He argued further that productions of the human brain are to the human as living beings, and he referred to this sort of mentality as a sort of fetishism which attaches itself to labor’s products. Once these products become commodities, they become inseparable from the production of commodities. Finally, Marx noted that the laborer must view his “labor-power” as his own property or commodity. The laborer, declared Marx, instead of being in a position to sell the commodities that incorporate his labor, is obligated to offer for sale as a commodity this own labor-power, which exists only within him. Marixsm and Critical Theory³ A common question among students of modern sociology and criminology is: how does Marxism differ from Critical Theory? Plainly stated, Critical Theory, which those of certain persuasions may commonly refer to or know of as “Cultural Marxism,” is more political than Marxism. Critical Theory speaks mainly of the dynamics of power to protect those in power. On the other hand, Marxism is largely economic and focuses on what Marx perceived as the exploitation of labor by the capitalist class. It is possible, however, that these two theories can work together, and many critical theorists come from a Marxist heritage. Marx believed that there had never been a classless society, and he used the dialectic, a historical accounting of past histories, to demonstrate how society had been led over time to capitalism. He thought that capitalism was one of a number of necessary stages of human development that would lead eventually to communism. He posited, as well, that a revolution of the masses would introduce the next step along the way, socialism. He concluded that communism would ultimately arise as part of a natural evolution that will occur as humankind develops. As alluded to above, critical theorists in sociology (and, one must be careful here, because literary scholars also talk about critical literary theory) have been influenced by the work of Marx and his critique of society in his works. A simple explanation is that they have built upon his work with a specific concentration on their particular societies and eras. Theorists such as Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse wrote about their society in Germany in the middle of the 20th century, and contemporary social theorists have built upon this to critique and examine society today. Although, it should be noted that, while we frequently think of the economic focus of Marx, included in his works is much that was in the realm of what more contemporary critical theorists would find interesting, particularly his work on alienation. FINAL THOUGHTS: The development of capitalism and the flaws of marxism It may be argued that one fundamental flaw of Marxism is that Marx failed to take into account the ways in which societies that set out to be classless evolved, and more importantly, failed to foresee how societies which maintained class distinctions would evolve. There is undeniably a process in society by which a dominant class emerges and attempts to either control or eliminate lower class elements that do not conform to societal norms, with those norms presumably being constructed so as to maintain the class system. These tools of oppression, themselves, could add to the sense of powerlessness that the underclass feels. We are made aware of such a thing by the notion of the “American Dream,” but increasingly, we sense that the mechanisms held out for achieving it simply don’t work for all people. American sociologist and strain theorist Robert K. Merton⁴ termed this dynamic “anomie.” Marx maintained a view of this, as well; that, increasingly, the underclass would be led to greater amounts of toil for fewer benefits, and ultimately, that automation would lead to the underclass being wholly expendable. In Marxist theory, it is easy to see how the advent of a classless society would resolve problems along the lines of anomie-strain theory (even if it preceded it). On the face of it, it would appear to be the perfect solution, with class ultimately eliminated and the desires of the individual replaced by allegiance to the state. By contrast, in a capitalistic system, competition would likely only amplify the separation between classes, and the envy both between classes and between individuals in each class. Yet, in practice, matters have not been so decided. One counter-argument often made to that observation is that Marx (primarily) set down a template for how society should be structured, and that in the real world of the Soviet Union, Communist China, and others, Marxist ideas were implemented imperfectly. Not only is that evidently true, but since the revolutions in those countries, they have drifted even further from Marxist ideals. Marxism presented a rather rigid set of ideals that led real-world implementations to being called imperfect or failures, while what is called capitalism has also mutated substantially in the last century, often to the detriment of the common individual or consumer, without a similarly pessimistic verdict placed on it. So, it is not so surprising, as evidenced by Liqun Cao (2004), that American society is, overall, no more anomic than countries considered far less capitalistic. Marx perceived capitalism as an ever-changing system. He described these alterations as being related to particularities and conflicts inherent to the capitalist mode of production. One substantial process illuminated by Marx was the propensity for a rise in the organic composition of capital. Capitalism, by its very nature, necessitates elevated productivity to subsist, and increases in productivity are made possible solely, over time, by a raise in the share of labor by machines as compared to human workers. Yet, that self-transformation has been capitalism’s primary relative strength, and while it is questionable how well capitalism will ultimately deal with automation’s displacement of human labor, there have been no alternatives offered which have wide credibility. On the other hand, as capitalist systems become evermore socialized, we may see a balance arise between a nearly entirely automated production capability and a prominent leisure class consisting of a similar class structure to what we have modernly, but with the lowest class still living in relative comfort. It is possible that, as time goes on, social control functions will be increasingly transferred from structures of civil society to structures of political society (the state, or government). Indeed, this appears to be exactly what we observe transpiring currently, with the ever-growing powers of governments in the West and the ever-growing influence of private enterprise in former communist countries such as Russia and China (Coase & Wang, 2016; Sharafutdinova, 2010). Excluding those countries that are still relegated to developing⁵ status, the economies of the world are seemingly gradually blending into a unified whole, which is neither entirely capitalistic nor entirely Marxist in nature. It may not be wrong to describe this as in keeping with Marxian Critical Theory, which does not shy away from criticism of any oppressive real-world implementations, even the ones that may have begun as Marxist in nature. All that separates the world's major economies is an adherence to hard-line ideologies that they each have, to a great extent, abandoned as a matter of practical development. Endnotes 1. The information provided in the brief discussion of alienation is drawn largely from Marx's Economic and Philosophical of 1844 and Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy. 2. The reference on alienation is to G.W.F. Hegel's Elements of the Philosophy of the Right, first published in 1820. 3. “Critical Theory” refers to the Western Marxist philosophy developed in the 1930s at the Frankfurt School, an institute of social theory and philosophy. The theory was developed primarily by Frankfurt School theorists Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, and Walter Benjamin. 4. The term anomie was popularized by French sociologist Émile Durkheim in his seminal monograph Suicide (1897) to describe a condition of normlessness or insufficient moral guidance in society. Robert K. Merton's later take on the subject was a more elaborate formulation of the concept, significantly applied ot the United States. 5. “Developing countries” are poor, industrially-underdeveloped agricultural nations with low Human Development Indices (HDI) as compared to other countries. Literature Cited Cao, L. (2004). Is American society more anomic? A test of Merton's theory with cross‐national data. International Journal of Comparative and Applied Criminal Justice, 28(1), 15-32. Coase, R., & Wang, N. (2016). How China became capitalist. Springer. Marx, K. (1867). Capital: A critique of political economy, volume I. Moscow: Progress Publishers. Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1908). The manifesto of the communist party. New York Labor News Company. (Original work published 1848). Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1956). The holy family or critique of critical critique. Foreign Languages Publishing House. (Original work published 1845). Marx, K. (1959). Economic and philosophic manuscripts of 1844. Moscow: Progress Publishers. (Original work published 1932). Sharafutdinova, G. (2010). Political consequences of crony capitalism inside Russia. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.